Information on the Internet exists in the form of hyperlinks that appear in different HTML pages. A news site for example may contain headlines that are hyperlinks to their detailed exposition. Similarly, a company's intranet may contain multiple pages with several hyperlinks on each.
Custom Internet portals to display web-centric information exist (e.g., myYahoo, myLycos etc.). These portals aggregate information from different HTML sources into one interface where it can be accessed through one interface. However, the possible number of sources from which information is aggregated is fairly minimal. In typical portals, the user chooses from pre-selected information collected from a pre-determined set of information sources. The user has no control over either the sources he/she gets the content from or the information that is harvested from those web-sites. Further, the user has very little control over how the information is presented.
For example, if the user is interested in Indian politics, Soccer, and Semiconductor High Tech companies, myYahoo allows the user to configure Yahoo's news source to filter through news on these topics. However, the user must take all this content strictly from Yahoo-selected content providers. This arrangement prohibits users from choosing not just the type of content but the source of the content as well. While, for example, a user may want to be able to receive world politics news from his two favorite Indian news dailies every morning, get his Hi-Tech news coverage from Red Herring and CNET, and get sports news from Cricket.org and dailysoccer.com, access to all these sites through a prior art internet portal would be predicated on the Internet portal offering access to all of the particular site via that particular portal. This limitation forces the users to have access to only “popular” sources of information and effectively bars them from getting anything else.
What is needed is a method that allows the user to select and completely configure both the source and content that he/she wants on his/her own portal or habitat. Such customizable habitats and portals are described in copending U.S. Patent Application entitled SYSTEM, METHOD, AND ARTICLE OF MANUFACTURE FOR GENERATING A CUSTOMIZABLE NETWORK USER INTERFACE, filed Jun. 7, 2001, and copending U.S. Patent Application entitled SYSTEM, METHOD, AND ARTICLE OF MANUFACTURE FOR WIRELESS ENABLEMENT OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB USING A WIRELESS GATEWAY filed Jun. 16, 2000 under Ser. No. 09/595,781, each of which is assigned to common assignee Clickmarks, Inc., each of which is herein incorporated by reference for all purposes.
One method for adding content to the habitat or portal described in the documents above required the user to open the habitat or portal and select an “add content” menu item which brought up an ActiveX window. The URL (or other address) of the desired website (or other content source) is entered into a field in the ActiveX window. When the website pops up, information from it is dragged into the habitat.
The present invention improves on the method of adding content to the habitat or portal by allowing a user to select content for a portal or habitat while surfing the web in a way that does not interrupt the surfing experience.